Laptop suggestions?

[Tom Evans]

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 21:45 -0300, Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Achim Patzner <ap at bnc.net> wrote:
> > Am 30.07.2008 um 18:40 schrieb Dag-Erling Smørgrav:
> >>
> >> I don't understand what Macs have to do with this - we're talking about
> >> iX Systems's made-for-BSD laptop.
> >
> > The thread started with someone asking for a mobile computer that
> > would support FreeBSD sufficiently and nobody came up with something
> > fitting the bill (and being available somewhere). Considering the
> > picture you're seeing at any place where more than two hardcore Unix
> > users assemble you're seeing a majority of Macs. There has to be an
> > obvious reason for that... I tried to break that habit more than once
> > but right now the only comfortable way of running FreeBSD on a laptop
> > is VMware Fusion on a Mac. Reading this entire thread convinced me
> > even more.
> 
> Please define "comfortable". I've been running FreeBSD 7.0 pretty
> comfortably on my HP nx6320 for several months now. I never attempted
> to use neither Bluetooth nor the fingerprint reader, so I don't miss
> them. The only real drawback I've found was that the memory card
> reader does not work. I also ran 8.0-CURRENT on a HP 6910p because 7.0
> did not support the WI-FI card.
> 
> --
> Carlos Santos
> Working, but not speaking (or advertising)  for HP :-)

Another happy BSD user on HP - nc6320 this time though. intel(4x)
graphics, wpi(4) wifi, bge(4) networking, fwochi(4) firewire, serial
port, plenty of USB ports. Even the fingerprint scanner works
(security/libfprint).
I don't use bluetooth or the card reader, so cannot comment on them.

The one down side of my HP laptop is the HP BIOS refuses to start up
with a different wifi card installed - I'd quite like to use an ath(4)
based card..

I could imagine if you just need to play with an OS, or if you mainly
develop the OS, running it under some sort of VM on a host system would
be more useful. For me, running under VM would be a nightmare. 

Tom
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